An inter/intranet multimedia service for telemedicine

The paper presents a new multimedia service for telemedicine that, based on a distributed architecture, allows any authorised user (from head physician to parish doctor) to retrieve all the medical information regarding her patients. The service, by means of any browser (Netscape, Mosaic, etc.), can be used through a personal computer connected to Internet and is built on top of the local and heterogeneous Radiological Information System (RIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) already in use in hospital centres. Thus the proposed new multimedia service is able to automatically and transparently search, find and retrieve, the continuously updated medical information stored on the RISs and PACSs of all the hospitals where a patient has been admitted. Integration with a Java applet to realise a search engine and a detailed description of a first prototype are reported. Finally, the security and privacy aspects required for such an application are discussed and some solutions proposed.